Prohibition has opposite effect

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for October 19, 2022)

Isn't it better to not create a problem in the first place than to try to fix it after it happens?

I appreciate those organizing a trash pick-up day, and those who took time out of their week to participate. I appreciate the people who don't toss their trash around in the first place. and those who regularly pick up litter whenever they see it, even more.

If there is a pre-existing problem, make sure any solution you try isn't going to have the unintended consequence of making things worse. In some cases, much worse. Such as what has happened with the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs.

I understand the desire to try to stop people from abusing, and dying of, dangerous drugs like Fentanyl. However, it would have been better to have never started down the doomed path of prohibition which made Fentanyl (and the stronger drugs which will replace it) inevitable.

With litter and prohibition, irresponsible people made a mess and the rest of us have to deal with it. But picking up trash doesn't make litter worse, while prohibition does make drug abuse much worse.

Trash is the easier problem to deal with because no one attacks you for picking up litter, but if you try to help get rid of trashy "mala prohibita" laws-- counterfeit "laws" which make crimes of things which aren't wrong, only forbidden-- such as drug laws, you risk being harmed by those whose jobs depend on those fake crimes being treated as though they are real. In a strange upside-down way, you're treated like the bad guy.

So many of the problems society faces were created or made worse by someone-- possibly with good intentions-- deciding to use political government to address an issue.

The war on poverty, waged with handouts of money confiscated from workers, trapped many people into generational poverty which is nearly impossible to escape.

Laws mandating safety have made people helpless to use judgment to keep themselves from being injured.

Legislation against guns has made everyone more vulnerable to bad people who have no intention of following the rules anyway.

These "cures" were worse than the disease.

Keep doing the same dumb things and you'll keep getting the same bad results. It's so much better to stop creating these problems out of situations which could have been easy to handle if you hadn't fertilized them and made them grow.

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